Local Marketing · Accountability
How to Tell If Your SEO Company Is Actually Doing Anything: 6 Checks You Can Run Yourself
You have been paying for months. A polished report arrives. The phone rings the same as it always did. Here is how to find out what is really happening without asking the people you are paying.
Key takeaways
- Every other guide gives you questions to ask your agency. That is structurally useless, because the agency answers them.
- Clicks from your own Search Console, compared against the period before the engagement, is the single most honest number available to you.
- An archived copy of your site from six months ago will tell you in thirty seconds whether any work physically reached the website.
- Ranking wins on terms no customer would ever type are the most common way a failing campaign looks successful on paper.
- Run all six checks on a fixed schedule. Half of them take under five minutes and none require agency cooperation.
01Why the usual advice fails
Search this question and you will find a dozen articles offering questions to ask your SEO agency. That advice cannot work, because the agency is the one answering.
This is not an accusation that agencies lie. It is a structural point. The party producing the evidence is the party being paid based on that evidence, and they choose which metrics appear. Rankings are the easiest number in marketing to move without moving the business, so a report built on rankings can be completely accurate and completely uninformative at the same time.
Contractors notice the pattern even when they cannot name it. One posting in r/Contractor put it plainly:
“There's so many lead and SEO/web scams out there it's insane.”
The six checks below are chosen for one property: none of them requires anything from your agency. You can run every one on your own tonight.
02Check 1: clicks, not rankings
Open Search Console, set the date range to the last six months, and compare it against the six months before the engagement started. Look at clicks. Not impressions, not average position, not the agency dashboard. Clicks.
Clicks are the first point in the chain where a real person chose to visit you. Everything before that point can improve while your business does not. If the click line is flat across six months of paid work, no explanation about algorithm volatility changes what the line says.
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| Clicks clearly up over six months | Something real is happening. Move to check 4 to confirm it is the right traffic. |
| Impressions up, clicks flat | You are appearing and not being chosen. Often a titles and meta problem, which is cheap to fix and worth raising. |
| Both flat | Six months of retainer has not reached a real person yet. Proceed to check 2. |
| Clicks down | Ask for the specific cause with a date attached. A competent agency can name the update or the change. |
03Check 2: did the site physically change
Real SEO leaves fingerprints on your website. Open an internet archive of your homepage and a main service page from before the engagement started, and put it next to the live version.
You are looking for anything at all: rewritten page titles, new service pages, added location pages, restructured headings, new content, faster loading. If the pages are functionally identical to what they were six months ago, then whatever work has been done lives in a spreadsheet and never reached the thing Google actually reads.
This check takes about two minutes and is the single most damning one available to a non-technical owner, because it needs no interpretation. The page either changed or it did not.
04Check 3: is the new content indexed
Published is not the same as indexed, and unindexed content earns nothing. In Search Console, use the URL inspection tool on the last three pages your agency published. It will tell you plainly whether Google has the page in its index.
You can also search Google for site:yourdomain.com to see roughly what is in the index for your site, though the inspection tool is the authoritative answer. If pages published three months ago are still not indexed, that is a real technical problem that should have been flagged to you proactively, and the fact that it was not is the finding.
05Check 4: do the terms have buying intent
This is where most failing campaigns hide. It is easy to reach position one for a phrase nobody types, and it produces a green arrow on a report and no calls at all.
In Search Console, open the queries list and sort by impressions. Read the top twenty terms and apply one test to each: would a person about to spend money on my service plausibly type this? Not could they. Would they.
| Query shape | Intent | Worth ranking for |
|---|---|---|
| emergency plumber [your city] | Ready to hire right now | Yes. This is the whole game. |
| cost to replace water heater | Researching, will hire soon | Yes. Capture and follow up. |
| how does a water heater work | Curiosity, no purchase | Rarely. Traffic without customers. |
| affordable professional plumbing solutions services | Nobody types this | No. This is a reporting artifact. |
If most of your wins are in the bottom two rows, the campaign is being optimised for the report rather than for your business. That is a conversation worth having with specifics in hand.
06Check 5: trace one booked job
Find one job you completed and got paid for that you can trace back to organic search. Just one. If you cannot find a single one across the entire engagement, that is the answer, and it outranks every other check on this page.
Most small operations do not have attribution set up, which makes this harder than it should be. The low-tech version works: for the next thirty days, ask every caller how they found you and write the answer down next to the job value. Thirty days of that beats six months of dashboards, and it doubles as the input you need to judge every other channel you pay for. The same discipline applied to lead platforms is covered in the five numbers that settle whether Angi is worth it.
07Check 6: what survives if you leave
Ask yourself what you would still own tomorrow if you stopped paying today. Content that ranks, pages that convert, a technically sound site and a Google Business Profile in good order are assets. They keep working after the invoices stop.
Reports, calls, spreadsheets and access to a dashboard are rented activity. They vanish the day you cancel. A retainer that has produced only the second category for six months has not been building anything, whatever the monthly summary said.
08Scoring it
Count how many of the six checks come back clean. The pattern matters more than any single result.
| Clean checks | Read | Action |
|---|---|---|
| 5 or 6 | The engagement is working, even if slower than you hoped. | Keep going. Re-run the checks quarterly. |
| 3 or 4 | Mixed. Usually real work aimed at the wrong targets. | Bring check 4 and check 5 to a direct conversation. Ask for a revised target list. |
| 0 to 2 | Very little is reaching your business. | Request a written plan with named deliverables and a 60 to 90 day review date. |
One thing none of these six checks covers, because no SEO report covers it either: whether an AI assistant names your business when a customer asks it for a recommendation. That channel now sits between the customer and your website, it does not appear in Search Console, and almost nobody is measuring it. See how to check whether ChatGPT recommends your business.
Measure the channel your SEO report cannot see
Linkeddit runs the questions your customers actually ask across the major AI assistants, records whether you are named or missing, and shows which sources the answer was built from. It is measurement you own, which is the whole point of everything above.
09FAQ
Frequently asked questions
How can I tell if my SEO company is actually doing anything?+
Run checks that do not depend on the agency for their input. Look at clicks rather than rankings in your own Search Console, compare an archived copy of your website against today to see whether anything physically changed, check whether new pages are indexed, and test whether the keywords they report on carry any buying intent. If clicks are flat, the site is unchanged, and the ranked terms are ones nobody would search before hiring you, very little is happening regardless of what the report says.
Why is asking my SEO agency for a report not enough?+
Because the party producing the report is the party being paid based on it. This is a structural conflict, not an accusation of dishonesty. Reports are built from the metrics the agency chose to include, and rankings are the easiest metric in marketing to make look good without moving the business. Any verification that routes through the vendor being verified is not verification.
What is the single best metric to judge SEO by?+
Clicks from organic search, taken from your own Google Search Console rather than an agency dashboard, and compared against the same period before the engagement started. Rankings are a leading indicator that is trivially gamed by targeting terms nobody searches. Traffic without conversion is a vanity number. Clicks are the first point in the chain where a real person chose to visit you.
How long should SEO take before I see results?+
Movement in impressions and clicks on lower-competition terms is reasonable within three to six months. Meaningful lead volume on competitive commercial terms usually takes longer. The problem is that this genuine timeline is also the most common excuse for underperformance, which is why you need the physical evidence checks: if nothing has changed on your website after six months, the timeline is not the reason.
What does it mean if my rankings improved but my phone is not ringing?+
Usually that you are ranking for terms with no buying intent. It is easy to reach position one for a long, specific phrase nobody types, and it produces a green arrow on a report and zero calls. Check the actual search terms in Search Console and ask whether a homeowner about to spend money would plausibly type them. If most of the wins are phrases you have never heard a customer say, the campaign is optimising for its own reporting.
Should contractors and local businesses pay for SEO at all?+
Often yes, but only with the same measurement discipline you would apply to a paid lead platform. The failure mode is not that SEO does not work, it is that it is bought without any way to verify it, which makes it the easiest line item in a small business budget to waste. Decide in advance what evidence would tell you it is working, and check that evidence yourself on a fixed schedule.
What should I do if the checks show nothing is happening?+
Bring the specific evidence to a direct conversation rather than cancelling immediately. Show the flat click line, the unchanged archived page, the unindexed content. Ask for a written plan with named deliverables and a review date sixty to ninety days out. If that date passes without movement on the same checks, you have a documented basis to leave rather than an argument about interpretation.